Craig is the second of three children born to Mallory and Doris Craig in Peoria, Illinois.[6] Mr. Craig's work with the T. P. & W. railroad took the family to Keokuk, Iowa, until his transfer to the home office in East Peoria in 1960. While a student at East Peoria Community High School (1963–67)[7] Craig became a championship debater and public speaker, being named his senior year to the all-state debate team and winning the state championship in oratory.[8] On the night of September 11, 1965, his junior year, he underwent a dramatic Christian conversion experience which re-directed the course of his life.[9][10][11][12]

After graduating from high school, Craig attended Wheaton College, a Christian college[13] west of Chicago, where he continued his debate activities, majoring in communications, where he was later named alumnus of the year.[1][14][15] At Wheaton, Craig studied under Stuart Hackett, whose Resurrection of Theism (1957) was to exert a major philosophical influence upon Craig's thought. It was his study of Edward John Carnell's An Introduction to Christian Apologetics (1948) while at Wheaton that sparked Craig's interest in Christian apologetics.[16] Craig graduated in 1971 and the following year married his wife Jan, whom he met on the staff of Campus Crusade for Christ.[17]

After a one-year stint at Westmont College on the outskirts of Santa Barbara,[22] Craig moved in 1987 with his wife and two young children back to Europe, where he pursued research for the next seven years as a visiting scholar at the Katholiecke Universiteit Leuven (Louvain) in Belgium. Out of that period of research issued seven books, among them God, Time, and Eternity (2001). In 1994 Craig accepted the invitation of J. P. Moreland and R. Douglas Geivett to join the department of Philosophy and Ethics at Talbot School of Theology in suburban Los Angeles as Research Professor of Philosophy, a position he currently holds.[9]

Craig established an online apologetic ministry, ReasonableFaith.org, to articulate his views on "biblical Christianity in the public arena," to "challenge unbelievers with the truth of biblical Christianity," and to "train Christians to state and defend Christian truth claims with greater effectiveness."[23] Craig frequently answers questions from members and visitors to the website's forums and explains his positions and theories on the Kalam cosmological argument for God's existence, divine omniscience, divine eternity, divine aseity, and the historicity of the resurrection of Jesus.

Granting the strict logical consistency of post-Cantorian, axiomatized infinite set theory, Craig says that the existence of an actually infinite number of things is nonetheless metaphysically impossible in view of counter-intuitive absurdities that would otherwise be possible.[29] One of Craig's favorite examples is the notorious Hilbert's Hotel, which can be fully occupied and yet, through the mere transposition of lodgers, accommodate endless infinities of additional guests. Craig pushes the illustration a notch beyond the original story by David Hilbert by inquiring what would happen if inverse arithmetical operations like subtraction were applied to the hotel. By envisioning different groups of guests checking out of the hotel, Craig says that one could subtract identical quantities from identical quantities and have non-identical quantities as remainders, which is absurd.[30] Stating that the mathematical conventions stipulated to ensure the logical consistency of transfinite arithmetic have no ontological force, Craig concludes that finitism is most plausibly true. Thus, the series of past events must be finite and the universe began to exist.[31]

Even if an actual infinite were metaphysically possible, the temporal nature of the series of past events, which has been formed by the successive addition of one event after another, raises peculiar problems. Craig says that just as it is impossible, despite the proponents of "super-tasks," to count to infinity, so it is metaphysically impossible to count down from infinity.[32] Craig says that an inversion of Russell's story of Tristram Shandy, who writes his autobiography so slowly that it takes him a whole year to record the events of a single day, is a counter-intuitive absurdity that could result from the formation of an actual infinite by successive addition. If it be eternal, the universe has endured through precisely such a temporal sequence in order for the present event or moment to arrive. It follows that the temporal sequence must not be infinite and therefore the universe began to exist.[33] Craig's development of this particular argument makes evident what is implicit throughout the kalam argument, namely, his presupposition of a tensed theory of time. This presupposition would later become a major research focus.

With respect to the large scale thermodynamic properties of the universe, Craig traces the physical discussion from the conundrum facing nineteenth century physics of why the universe, if it will reach a state of thermodynamic equilibrium or heat death in a finite time, is not now in such a state, given that it has already existed for infinite time. He says that the advent of relativity theory altered the description of the universe's thermodynamic extinction, but did not affect the fundamental question.[38] Indeed, Craig says that the recent discovery that the expansion of the universe is accelerating only piques the problem by speeding up the universe's disintegration into causally isolated islands destined to a cold, dark death. He says that most physicists therefore take the universe's observed disequilibrium as evidence that the universe is not, after all, past eternal and its low entropy was simply put in as an initial condition.[39] Craig says that attempts to avoid this conclusion by postulating a multiverse of worlds in varying thermodynamic states encounter the problem of Boltzmann brains — that it becomes highly probable for any observer that the entire observable universe is but an illusion of his own brain, a solipsistic conclusion which no rational person would embrace.[40]

On the basis of these four lines of evidence, Craig concludes that the premise that the universe began to exist is more plausible than not. Conjoined with the premise that whatever begins to exist has a cause, a premise which Craig again defends both philosophically and scientifically,[41] the cosmic beginning implies the existence of an supernatural cause. By the nature of the case, such a cause must be an uncaused, beginningless, changeless, timeless, spaceless, immaterial being of enormous power.[42] Finally, Craig says, appealing to the "Principle of Determination" described by medieval Muslim theologians, that the only way to explain the origin of an effect with a beginning from a beginningless cause is if the cause is a personal agent endowed with freedom of the will. Thus, he arrives at a personal Creator of the universe.[43]

One of the central questions raised by the classical doctrine of divine omniscience is the compatibility of divine foreknowledge and human freedom. The question subdivides into two:
(1) If God foreknows the occurrence of some event E, does E happen necessarily?,[44] and
(2) If some event E is contingent, how can God foreknow E's occurrence? Craig has addressed each of these questions at considerable length.[45]

The first question raises the issue of theological fatalism. Craig attempts to reduce this problem to the problem of logical fatalism, which holds that if it is true that E will happen, then E will happen necessarily. He challenges theological fatalists to show how the addition of God's knowing some future-tense statement to be true adds anything essential to the problem over and above that statement's being true. Craig then examines logical fatalism[46] He says that fatalism must be fallacious because it posits a non-causal constraint on human freedom which is unintelligible. He says that the flaw in logical fatalism is in a mistaken analysis of what it means for an act to be "within one's power," and that logical fatalists misconstrue the impossibility of bringing about a logical contradiction as an infringement of personal ability.[47][48]

Returning to theological fatalism, Craig says that fatalists have misunderstood "temporal necessity," or the necessity of the past. Craig says that our intuitions of the past's necessity are rooted in the causal closedness of the past, and that the impossibility of backward causation does not imply that I cannot have a sort of counterfactual power over past events.[49] That is, if God has foreknowledge of a person's acts, then they have the ability to act in such a way that, if they were to act in that way, then the past would have been different. Building on the work of Alfred Freddoso, Craig offers an analysis of temporal necessity according to which many past, historical events are not, at this point, temporally necessary. He says that it is still possible for an agent to act in such a way, that were he to do so, that event would never have occurred, and that from the fact that the event has occurred we can know that the agent will not in fact so act, but it remains nevertheless within his power to do so.

The second question arising from divine foreknowledge of future contingents concerns the means by which God knows such events.[54] Craig says that the question presupposes a tensed or A-Theory of time, for on a tenseless or B-Theory of time there is no ontological distinction between past, present, and future, so that contingent events which are future relative to us are no more difficult for God to know than contingent events which are, relative to us, past or present. Distinguishing between perceptualist and conceptualist models of divine cognition, Craig says that models which construe God's foreknowledge of the future along perceptualist lines (God foresees what will happen) are difficult to reconcile with a tensed theory of time (though one might say that God perceives the present truth-values of future contingent propositions). He does not similarly challenge a conceptualist model which construes God's knowledge along the lines of innate ideas.[55]

The doctrine of middle knowledge is one such conceptualist model of divine cognition which Craig has explored. Formulated by the Jesuit theologian Luis de Molina, the doctrine of middle knowledge holds that logically prior to his decree to create a world God knew what every possible creature he might create would freely do in any possible set of circumstances in which God might place him. On the basis of his knowledge of such counterfactuals of creaturely freedom[56] and his knowledge of his own decree to create certain creatures in certain circumstances, along with his own decision how he himself shall act, God automatically knows everything that will actually and contingently happen, without any perception of the world.[57]

Differentiating between two senses of "eternal" as either timeless or infinitely omnitemporal, Craig first examines a plethora of arguments aimed at showing either that God is timeless or omnitemporal.[64] Craig defends the coherence of a timeless, personal being, but says that the arguments for divine timelessness are unsound or inconclusive.[65] By contrast, he gives two arguments in favor of divine temporality. First, Craig says that if a temporal world exists, then in virtue of his real relations to that world, God cannot remain untouched by its temporality.[66] Given his changing relations with the world, God must change at least extrinsically, which is sufficient for his existing temporally. Second, Craig says that if a temporal world exists, then in virtue of his omniscience, God must know tensed facts about the world, such as what is happening now, which is, again, sufficient for his being temporally located. Since a temporal world does exist, it follows that God exists in time.[67]

Craig says that there is one way of escape from these arguments for a defender of divine timelessness. The first argument based on God's relation to the world presupposes the reality of temporal becoming, and the second argument based on God's knowledge of the world presupposes the objectivity of tensed facts. In other words, both arguments presuppose an A-Theory of time. The defender of divine timelessness can avert their force by embracing a B-Theory of time and denying the objective reality of tensed facts and temporal becoming.[68] Craig concludes that one's theory of time is a watershed issue for one's doctrine of divine eternity.[69]

In his twin volumes The Tensed Theory of Time (2000) and The Tenseless Theory of Time (2000) Craig therefore undertakes a thorough examination of the arguments for and against the A- and B-Theories of time respectively.

Elements of Craig's philosophy of time include his differentiation between time itself and our measures thereof (a classical Newtonian theme), his reductive analysis of spatial "tenses" to the location of the "I-now," his defense of presentism on the basis of the presentness of experience, his analysis of McTaggart's paradox[70] as an instance of the problem of temporary intrinsics, his defense of a neo-Lorentzian interpretation of special relativity, and his formulation of a tensed possible worlds semantics.[71]

Having concluded that time is tensed, Craig turns to articulating a doctrine of divine eternity and God's relationship to time. Defending Leibniz's anti-Newtonian argument against God's enduring for infinite time prior to creation and appealing to kalam arguments against infinite, past metric time, Craig says that God exists timelessly sans the universe and temporally since the moment of creation.[72] Craig says that cosmic time, which registers the proper time of the universe's duration in general relativistic cosmological models, is the measure of God's time. The universe is, Craig concludes, God's clock.[73]

Craig's two volumes The Historical Argument for the Resurrection of Jesus (1985) and Assessing the New Testament Evidence for the Historicity of the Resurrection of Jesus (3d ed., 2002) are said by Christian reviewers Gary Habermas and Christopher Price to be among the most thorough investigations of the event of Jesus' resurrection.[74][75] In the former volume, Craig describes the history of the discussion, including Humean arguments against the identification of the miraculous. The latter volume is an exegetical study of the New Testament material pertinent to the resurrection.

(1) The tomb of Jesus was found empty by a group of his female followers on the Sunday after his crucifixion.[77]
(2) Various individuals and groups experienced appearances of Jesus alive after his death.
(3) The earliest disciples came to believe that God had raised Jesus from the dead despite strong predispositions to the contrary.

Craig then says that the best explanation of these three events is that God raised Jesus from the dead.[79] This involves him in a critique of rival hypotheses, in particular Lüdemann's hallucination hypothesis.[80] Craig says that the resurrection hypothesis best meets the standard criteria for weighing historical hypotheses such as explanatory power, explanatory scope, degree of ad hoc-ness, plausibility, and so forth.[81] In response to those who would regard a miraculous hypothesis as excessively improbable, Craig says that given the existence of a personal Creator of the universe, as demonstrated by arguments of natural theology, and the higher probability of the evidence on the resurrection hypothesis than on its negation, the resurrection hypothesis cannot be said to be improbable.[82] He says that the probability of a miraculous explanation of the evidence is increased when one locates the resurrection of Jesus in its religio-historical context of Jesus' ministry and personal statements, whose authenticity Craig defends.[83] That context also provides the interpretive key to the meaning of Jesus' resurrection, which Craig says is the divine vindication of the allegedly blasphemous statements for which Jesus was tried and sent to his death.[84]

Craig favors a neutral logic, according to which the formal quantifiers of first-order logic, as well as the informal quantifiers of ordinary language, are not ontologically committing.[90] He also advocates a deflationary theory of reference, according to which referring is a speech act rather than a word-world relation, so that singular terms may be used in true sentences without commitment to corresponding objects in the world.[91] If one stipulates that first-order quantifiers are being used as devices of ontological commitment, then Craig adverts to Fictionalism, in particular Pretense Theory, according to which statements about abstract objects are expressions of make-believe, imagined to be true, though literally false.[92] Craig's work in this area is ongoing, so that his final positions are yet to be determined.[93]

^Poe, Harry Lee; Mattson, J. Stanley (2005). Time, Eternity, and Divine Knowledge. Baylor University Press. p. 193. ISBN978-1-932792-12-6. He is the founder of the Evangelical Association for the Promotion of Education (EAPE) and the author of many popular books, including A Reasonable Faith, It's Friday but Sunday's Coming, Let Me Tell You a Story, Carpe Diem, Which Jesus?, and Following Jesus Without Embarrassing God.|accessdate= requires |url= (help)

^ReasonableFaith.org | William Lane Craig | Q&A #154 Lightning Strikes Againhttp://www.reasonablefaith.org/lightning-strikes-again Answer to question 8: "I think that the prosperity gospel of health and wealth is a false doctrine and an abomination. That gospel won't preach in Darfur, Iraq, North Korea, or a thousand other places, and if it won't preach there, it's not the true Gospel."

^[Craig writes: "If we take "random" to mean "irrespective of usefulness to the organism," then randomness is not incompatible with direction or purpose. For example, suppose that God in His providence causes a mutation to occur in an organism, not for the benefit of the organism, but for some other reason (say, because it will produce easy prey for other organisms that He wants to flourish or even because it will eventually produce a fossil that I will someday find, which stimulates my interest in palaeontology, so that I embark upon the career God had in mind for me). In such a case, the mutation is both purposeful and random." "Q&A #253: Evolutionary Theory and Theism", Reasonablefaith.org, accessed at http://www.reasonablefaith.org/evolutionary-theory-and-theism. See also "Q&A #263: Who Speaks for Science?", accessed at http://www.reasonablefaith.org/who-speaks-for-science]